Tetsuya Nomura contributed more to FFVII than Hironobu Sakaguchi but people are not ready to admit it.

[X-SOLDIER]

While this is a nice write-up from multiple reliable sources at the end of the day, it is obvious that his contributions to FFVII were really early on, and he was not involved like other staff members.

I'm curious what you mean by, "he was not involved like other staff members." because I don't think that any of the information in that entire article supports that – but also beyond that, it dismissively undercuts the significance of what all of his contributions are.

He's the reason FFVII was a 3D game and also why it was on PlayStation rather than Nintendo. That alone is massive, and is the sort of near-executive level decision of putting together a team and making the pitch for something like that no one else would have pushed for with the sort of singular vision that he was known for & what my last post primarily focused on detailing & emphasizing why it's not as easy to draw a 1:1 with the decisions that the others were making.

On top of that, he was also doing things like managing offices, focusing on corporate responsibilities, and other things like that to ensure that the game would be a success, and that the overall environment itself was one where everyone could pull off what they were doing. As I stated before – his contributions weren't about the sort of granular minutiae in the little parts of the character appearances or narrative design that the others were doing, but those were still things where he was directly involved but the others were being given more agency and taking up more prominent positions – but it's still all happening under his guidance.

As a more direct example of what this was like structurally:

Motonori Sakakibara (Movie director, Square)
"In the late ’90s, all the game companies had lots of money — especially Square, of course. So Square prioritized quality rather than obsessing over costs. That was how Sakaguchi-san operated. He always asked for a lot from the team and gave us tight schedules, but he backed up those requests with big teams and the best hardware. That was a very rare situation. He was always looking at a big vision, but at the same time, how to make it a reality."

And also specifically to FFVII:

"Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura had begun to take leadership roles over day-to-day work on the Final Fantasy series, seeing through Sakaguchi’s high-level plans and story ideas. Kitase had long been a film buff who liked the parallels between film and game storytelling. Nomura came to the series as an artist, gradually taking on more creative responsibility."

This emphasizes that Sakaguchi is giving high-level direction to the project that aligns directly to his role in the company, while Nomura, Kitase, & Nojima are all involved in the more granular details of seeing that vision through. That's EXACTLY what you'd expect from all of them in their various roles, and what types of contributions they're making to that.

None of that at all even remotely suggests that Sakaguchi wasn't continually involved, and it reinforces details about his role & contributions from the people who were actually there. That's why I don't think that anything you just claimed to the contrary is "obvious" or even accurate at all.



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[Odysseus]

I think this really just boils down to:

- Sakaguchi was extremely important in making high level decisions such as the style and platform of the game, as well as assembling the team that would make the game. He also established a few baseline elements such as mako, a big city powered by it, and the detective/terrorist story that would all be iterated on and remixed but the main development staff.

- Conversely, he had little to do with the on-the-ground writing and directing decisions that would culminate in the FFVII story we all know.

To say he wasn't important would be massively reductive, but to attribute the game to him entirely would also be an enormous overstatement.

 

[Nandemoyasan]

I feel like the OP simply wants to minimize Sakaguchi's role in the development of FFVII, and it doesn't feel like any evidence or argument to the contrary is going to rock that boat, but what the hey? It's all in good fun, anyhow.

To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me at all that someone being so central to Squaresoft's general business doings at the time would have to have most of the work done by others. By that time, Sakaguchi was sort of constrained to play the role that the Squaresoft execs wanted him to. He'd become the "Face of Final Fantasy," and the games were doing well financially (understatement of the year, right?), so I get it that the Suits wanted him to take on more of a leadership role, he'd become the de facto spokesperson for Squaresoft.

I wonder how big a part this pressure to take on more of an "elder statesman" role had on his decision to jump ship? Also, I wonder if one of the core concepts he had in mind when he formed Mistwalker was that he wanted to be more directly involved in development, again?

 

[Wanderer]

I feel like the OP simply wants to minimize Sakaguchi's role in the development of FFVII, and it doesn't feel like any evidence or argument to the contrary is going to rock that boat, but what the hey? It's all in good fun, anyhow.

To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me at all that someone being so central to Squaresoft's general business doings at the time would have to have most of the work done by others. By that time, Sakaguchi was sort of constrained to play the role that the Squaresoft execs wanted him to. He'd become the "Face of Final Fantasy," and the games were doing well financially (understatement of the year, right?), so I get it that the Suits wanted him to take on more of a leadership role, he'd become the de facto spokesperson for Squaresoft.

I wonder how big a part this pressure to take on more of an "elder statesman" role had on his decision to jump ship? Also, I wonder if one of the core concepts he had in mind when he formed Mistwalker was that he wanted to be more directly involved in development, again?

This is not me trying to minimize his role in FFVII; it is a fairly objective truth with evidence to back it up, which is easily and readily available. This is just me pointing out misconceptions some people have, thinking that FF games were not a collaborative effort. He didn’t jump ship, he cost Squaresoft 100s of millions of dollars due to his vanity project failing so hard during an era where the Japanese economy was very unstable, forcing Enix to walk away from the merger, even FFX being a hit did not bring them to the table, it was not until KH became a hit that they came back, Sakaguchi was ashamed and pretty much left on his own, He has not done anything significant after leaving Square either aside for making the most mid games ever and switiching to the mobile market after even those failed to make an impact.

 

[Clement Rage]

Who has the misconception? Of course it's a collaborative effort, any project this size is.

Drilling down into the motivations is extremely speculative at best, because not all of them will be public knowledge.

 

[Nandemoyasan]

This is not me trying to minimize his role in FFVII; it is a fairly objective truth with evidence to back it up, which is easily and readily available. This is just me pointing out misconceptions some people have, thinking that FF games were not a collaborative effort. He didn’t jump ship, he cost Squaresoft 100s of millions of dollars due to his vanity project failing so hard during an era where the Japanese economy was very unstable, forcing Enix to walk away from the merger, even FFX being a hit did not bring them to the table, it was not until KH became a hit that they came back, Sakaguchi was ashamed and pretty much left on his own, He has not done anything significant after leaving Square either aside for making the most mid games ever and switiching to the mobile market after even those failed to make an impact.

Look man you clearly have some kind of problem with Hironobu Sakaguchi, and I don't think it's un-obvious from the way you are speaking about the man.

I've probably screwed up worse than he has, lol

 

[X-SOLDIER]

This is not me trying to minimize his role in FFVII; it is a fairly objective truth with evidence to back it up, which is easily and readily available.

Then... provide that evidence.

Whenever you're making a claim, you have the responsibility of the burden of proof... and yet you've never linked to even a single source that substantiates your position. Especially if evidence for that is "easily & readily available" then you should be making sure to compile that right from the start – because right now, the only thing that you're providing is your own personal opinion, which is slathered in language dripping with so much bias that it's impossible to just take at face value.

On top of that, you even designed this thread title in a way that frames the subject of the scope of Sakaguchi's involvement in FFVII as being something that most people don't agree with... which means that's it's not a fairly objective truth. Your framing even makes it obvious that it's an argument that needs to have evidence to support your claim that is a disruption to that collective perspective that is commonly accepted – and yet you've provided literally nothing that does that.

Beyond that, the three links that WERE provided by Null in the very first reply, as well as literally all of the evidence that I've provided that contextualize more about Sakaguchi's role in the company and within the larger team at the time not ONLY include first-hand accounts from interviews with people who personally worked with Sakaguchi while Final Fantasy VII was being developed – including Nomura himself, but they're also all in fairly strong opposition to what you're claiming about those two specifically and their respective contributions to FFVII.

We've all done our homework on this already. The most easily & readily available evidence is stacked against your claim, but I think that the more telling detail is here:

This is just me pointing out misconceptions some people have, thinking that FF games were not a collaborative effort.

In my 20+ years in the FFVII fan community, literally cannot think of a single individual EVER who has thought that the Final Fantasy games were not a collaborative effort. That's just a ridiculous strawman that's not at all representative of the "people are not ready to admit it" type claim you're making that suggests this position is a broadly accepted viewpoint. Again, if there's evidence that people like this actually exist at all, let alone in substantial enough number that this is a clarification that needs to be made... provide that evidence.





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